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On Tuesday, Obamacare sign-ups passed 7 million, six months after the launch of a federal website that could barely sign up anybody. There are still a lot of questions about how solid that figure is, but the idea that the law could even come close to the original goal after such a disastrous start would have been laughable even a few weeks ago.

It was also a wake-up call for Republicans and conservatives, and even the occasional liberal, who pushed the argument that the failed website challenges the idea at the heart of Obama’s agenda — that government can still solve big social problems.

That’s left the critics questioning the early numbers or changing the subject. It’s a reminder that the attacks on the website were more than complaints about technology, but a proxy for a much deeper argument about what government should do and what it can’t do.

Take conservative writer Charles Krauthammer.

In November, Krauthammer wrote that Obamacare was a symbol of Obama’s “new, more ambitious, social-democratic brand of American liberalism” and that its failure “would catastrophically undermine their ideology of ever-expansive central government providing cradle-to-grave care for an ever-grateful citizenry.”

Now, Krauthammer says the question is different. It’s about how real the numbers are, he says, after accounting for people who won’t pay their premiums and people who are just replacing old insurance with new insurance.

“At the very beginning, when they weren’t even able to sign anybody up, it seemed like the airplane couldn’t even get off the ground,” Krauthammer said in an interview. “Now we’ll see whether it can actually fly.”

Critics don’t think the 7 million figure will hold up, once you take out the people who haven’t paid their premiums and the ones who weren’t uninsured. And most say the Affordable Care Act is causing so many other problems — especially for people who were displaced from their previous insurance, have higher premiums than they used to pay, or face reduced work hours — that it’s a long way from being vindicated.

There’s also a subtle distancing that’s going on, as some conservatives argue that it was never all about the website anyway.

In October, Yuval Levin sounded this warning in National Review: “The technical failures of the exchange websites raise grave alarms about the technocratic vision at the core of Obamacare. That technocratic vision begins from the notion that we already possess the knowledge it takes to run an efficient health-financing system and all that remains is to apply that knowledge from the center, with the government defining the insurance product strictly and then compelling insurers to sell it, compelling consumers to buy it, managing the countless assorted variables and pressures involved, and calling what results a market.”

On Tuesday, Levin said the important question is not the website, but whether it “makes sense to centralize the economics of health care in this way” — so the new enrollment numbers are “not the answer to that question.”

“If the question was, ‘Can the government run a website?’ it might have seemed in November like the answer was, ‘No.’ And they’ve certainly recovered from that,” said Levin. “The question at the heart of the debate was never, ‘Can the government run a website?’ The question is whether its approach to health economics is going to be viable.”

Republicans did their best to insist the new numbers weren’t really important.

“That misses the whole issue,” Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma said of the news of the enrollment surge. “You can play the numbers game, which is what they’re playing, but the devil is in the details, and the details are not good.”

And House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, who on the same day released a budget plan that would repeal the law, wasn’t fazed by the enrollment news.

“I think Obamacare is a slow-rolling fiasco. I think it’s a Pyrrhic victory,” the Wisconsin lawmaker said during a conference call with reportersTuesday, at the same time that Obama was giving his victory speech in the Rose Garden.

But it was so much easier when they could just say the federal government can’t tie its own shoelaces. Now, they have to acknowledge that the government fixed the problem — and enrollment came roaring back.

Obama certainly sounded like he felt vindicated on Tuesday. He teased the media about its constant reporting of every website stumble and declared that the sign-up surge proved that the law’s goal of expanded coverage is no pipe dream.